Pentagon Admits Hackers Stole 24,000 Secret Files

Just days after the hacker group Anonymous announced a huge haul from the government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, the Pentagon admitted today that back in March some hackers (though not necessarily Anonymous) managed to steal 24,000 "sensitive Pentagon files during a single intrusion," the New York Times reports. Officials failed to name the culprit, but called them "foreign intruders." The admission came from Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III during a speech announcing a new Pentagon cyber strategy, hopefully better than the old one, which Lynn said had allowed "terabytes of data" to be taken from defense contractors over the past decade. With hacking making headlines, and in the word of the CIA's Leon Panetta, some 60,000 "new malicious software programs or variations...identified every day threatening our security, our economy and our citizens," this new strategy better be really ready. [NYT, WaPo]